SuperFreak

While I was pondering on the superb wisdom that I learn from Freakonomics, our famous local magazine put its brother - SuperFreakonomics - under the limelight.

One of the major focus of the book was the debate on global warming. In short, Steven Levitt put much emphasis on Nathan Myhrvhold's idea of pumping sulfur into the upper atmosphere. The idea comes from the observation following the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, which discharged more than 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere - acting like a layer of sunscreen and reducing the amount of solar radiation, with resultant cooling off the earth by an average of one degree Farenheit.

Ingenious it seems, I am worried.

Seasoned readers of this blog may notice I put up The Scream of Edvard Munch as my profile picture.

Do you notice the colour of the sky ? Although Munch was portraying the Norwegian scene, the sky was red as a result of the 1883 eruption of volcano Krakatoa from Indonesia. With that event, temperature of the globe dropped by 2 degrees, all rain became acidic (it was sulfur dioxide !), and agricultural production fell for some years, followed by several political repercussion.

I need to scream.